Exodus 20:12

 

 

I quote The New American Bible version of the 5^th Commandment: “Honor thy father and thy mother, that you may have a long life in the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you.”

 

I am not going to go into much detail about this commandment, other than to suggest that the Mother and the Father wish for us to honor our mothers and fathers, in heaven, and our biological parents, here on earth.

 

Dennis Prager has a very sensible explanation of this Commandment, so the reader can watch his Prager U video on this subject. In short, Prager admits there are devilish parents like a father that physically, sexually, or emotionally abuses his children, so this father likely never deserves love, honor and being liked by his children. They could forgive him if they wanted to, for their own peace of mind, for lingering hatred poisons the well-being of the brooding victim.

 

Such radical exceptions to the rule acknowledge, Prager advises that we love our parents and honor them, even if we do not like them, and that sometimes cannot be helped or ever made whole or better.

 

Prager wants the young to be kind to their parents, to respect them, and treat them with kindness and attention, going to see them once in awhile, and not cutting off the visits to the grandchildren, disappearing an elderly parent for voting for Donald Trump.

 

Adult children should attend to and care for their parents and elderly relatives in their old age and declining years, and never abuse them or rip them off financially, never to neglect them or exclude them from social affairs, or to fail to go see them.

 

Here is this same Commandment as recorded in the Holy Bible (KJV): “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”

 

My response: It seems to me that Yahweh has given the Hebrews a land of plenty on which to live and prosper on earth. Beyond that initial gift, Yahweh is reminding them of the covenant between Yahweh and the Hebrews, and the implicit covenant that—unwritten, unspoken and unrecognized as it may be in local actualities around the world, that exists between humans and their respective benevolent deities anywhere: that humans are to obey God’s or the gods’ commandments in exchange for God's expressed approval, mutual communications, and protections bestowed by God on the faithful that honor the mutual covenant by obeying God’s commandments, among other expected behaviors--by the Deity and deities—for humans to perform.